(HOST) Commentator Deborah Luskin has recently been thinking about the value of persistence.
(LUSKIN) Seeing the galleys for my first book was like seeing a sonogram of a baby that’s been growing inside me for years. Like one of those biblical matriarchs, I feel as if I’ve been waiting six hundred years for this birth. In truth, it’s only been twenty-five.
I received my first rejection letter in 1985 for a novel I’d written the previous year. The letter arrived on my twenty-ninth birthday, and I despaired of achieving my goal of having a book published before I turned thirty. Two manuscripts and twenty-five years later, I’m finally breaking into print.
During the twenty-five years I’ve been drafting novels, I’ve also done some other interesting things, like raised a family, run a business, taught literature to healthcare workers and writing to inmates; and I’ve done some less interesting things, like laundry. I’ve worried about my children, argued with my husband, witnessed my parentsage, and – always – kept writing.
A few years ago, a published friend of mine said to me, "The single thing that separates those who get into print from those who don’t is persistence."
I persisted.
I have enough rejection letters to wallpaper the interior of a small house. There were months when I could have been working in a boomerang factory, when all the typescripts I sent out kept coming back home. But a year ago, I received the letter I’d been waiting for, and very soon, a book of mine will be in print.
People have asked me what gave me the chutzpah to keep refusing to accept repeated rejection. My answer: my cats and my dog.
Groucho Marx said, "Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read." My dog is a great companion, but she’s illiterate. She dislikes the indoor, sedentary pleasures of literature. Daily, she insists on taking me for a walk, so she can chase chipmunks in the woods. Even though she never catches one, my dog never passes up the challenge. She flings herself over stonewalls and gives herself whole-heartedly to the chase. And she’s never discouraged by her failure to catch a chipmunk, only by my failure, some days, to take her out.
My cats, on the other hand, want me to do nothing but sit at my desk. They approve of literature. One of them likes to watch the cursor progress across my computer screen; the other likes to curl up in a manuscript box, anchoring the pages in place. As far as they’re concerned, the only reason for me to stop writing is to open a can of cat food.
Between the cats and the dog, I’ve been blessed with companions who have provided me with models of both focus and persistence. They’ve been good company during the lonely years of writing in silence – a silence, I’m delighted to report, that is coming to an end.